After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  The aristocrats had had their day when it came to providing leadership for the party, but Baldwin needed to keep the grandees happy – Lord Salisbury, Balfour and the rest. Apart from anything else, if he brought back the coalitionists who had sat in Lloyd George’s cabinet, it would inevitably mean sacking some of the aristocrats whom Law had appointed in their stead. He needed to please both elements, and an election was a good way of doing this. After only six months in office, he gambled that if he went to the country he would ‘dish the Goat’, i.e. Lloyd George, and silence opposition from his own ranks. Conservatives dislike being in opposition, and will put up any show of unity in the face of a General Election. So Baldwin gambled, and he lost. Being consistently wrong is not nearly so dangerous a quality for politicians as being right. People will forgive a politician for being wrong. Baldwin was wrong in most of his economic predictions, most of his political judgements, most of his foreign policy. He would remain in office for much of the most crucial period of twentieth-century history. But, in this first instance of his wrongness, he lost an election – though his party remained the largest in the Commons.

  It was a big poll – 74 per cent of the electorate voted. The Conservatives and their allied candidates secured 258 seats. The Liberals were now united again, with Asquithians and Lloyd George Liberals fighting on a single platform. They won 158 seats. But the Labour party won 191 seats. The Liberals were therefore in the position of holding a balance of power. As the party in third place, they could not expect office themselves, but they could, if they chose, support the Conservatives. Instead, they made an historic decision. They were caught up in a momentous political change. Anxious not to have a socialist Prime Minister, the king called Baldwin and asked him to form a government. Politically astute, Baldwin suggested he instead should invite Ramsay MacDonald to do so, thereby at one stroke bringing the Labour Party into the safety of the Establishment, and destroying the Liberals. They were never to hold office again – even though it was from their ranks that the biggest political innovations of the twentieth century in Britain would come: the advocacy of the economic theories of the Liberal John Maynard Keynes, and the report by the Liberal Sir William Beveridge which led, in the 1940s, to the establishment of a Welfare State.

  The Liberal party has always been, historically, the Labour party’s midwife, and so it was in its first electoral triumph. On 22 January 1924 the king called upon James Ramsay MacDonald to form a government.

  The 1918 Representation of the People Act not only added women over thirty to the electorate, but also the poorer one-third of adult males who had remained unenfranchised by the 1884 Reform Act. This was what caused a surge in the Labour vote. The working classes made up the huge majority of the British population: 78.29 per cent of the population in 1921, and only very slightly less ten years later. This represented 30.2 million people in 1921, and nearly 32 million in 1931. From the moment they left school at fourteen, most British people were destined for a lifetime of hard and usually monotonous work in factories, mines, docks, distributive trades, agriculture, or as domestic servants. Yet if work was boring, and life-shortening, unemployment was worse, and the phenomenon of unemployment was a spectre which now haunted Europe and was to change entirely its political complexion. Unemployment in the close of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first is a risk that most people may run. In the 1920s it was almost entirely a working-class phenomenon.

  Political ideologues would be tempted to assume that this represented a huge and potentially revolutionary movement of left or right. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The indifference of the British to religion is matched only by their indifference to politics; and in so far as they do have political interests, those have often defied expectation. It is the working classes in Britain who have consistently cheered on imperialism and warmongering, while the well-meaning middle classes tried to spoon-feed them with improvement.

  Just as the national Church, formed from warring factions of Catholics and Puritans, had successfully managed to keep the religious temperature lukewarm for three hundred years, so the Labour Party, in many respects its secular equivalent, would manage to dissipate and dilute any tendencies within its ranks towards radical socialism. Zealots will always be scornful both of the Church of England and of the Labour Party. In fact both were institutions in which the British, and most specifically the English, learned the delicate art of living with contradictions and compromise, and became a mature political democracy. Whereas in other countries, social democrats, trade unionists, Marxists, state socialists who fell just short of Marxist, royalists, Christian socialists and advanced atheist secularists would have felt the need to form separate organizations of their own, in Britain they had somehow managed together to form the Labour Party. Like the Church in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the Labour Party, as it girded itself to take electoral power at the beginning of the 1920s, was really a coalition of mutually antagonistic, and indeed contradictory, sects.

  There was the old Independent Labour Party, or ILP, which was the largest affiliated socialist society. It believed in state socialism, the nationalization of banks and major industries. Then there were the Trade Unions, who were very often much more right-wing than the ILP. Arthur Henderson, for example, who was the Home Secretary in the new government, was a representative of the Friendly Society of Ironfounders, but had never entertained any socialist beliefs at all. He merely wanted fair working conditions for his members. Then there were the Fabian socialists of whom the high priest was the new President of the Board of Trade, Sidney Webb. Together with his tall, elegant wife Beatrice, this tiny bulbous-headed figure, whom his wife likened to a tadpole, had founded the London School of Economics and the New Statesman to promote their doctrine of socialist gradualism. By means of education and persuasion, it would be possible for socialist ideas to ‘permeate’, and without immediate confiscation of personal property, the state could achieve the same result gradually by a rising scale of appropriation of middle-class savings and assets.

  The new government was not in power for long enough to attempt any political changes, and it knew, in any event, that if it did try to be socialist, the Liberal Party would unite with the Tories to put it out of office. It had merely, as it were, sniffed the air.

  It certainly tells us something about what had happened to England, that in the summer of 1923 the Marquess of Curzon supposed he was about to become Prime Minister, and six months later that office was handed to the illegitimate son of a female farmworker and a ploughman, from Lossiemouth, Morayshire. Malcolm Muggeridge, in his book on The Thirties, observed that:

  it is impossible for one man, however determined and cunning he may be, to impose his will on other men for long unless they recognize themselves in him … Thus it was not chance or his own ambition merely which carried Ramsay MacDonald to the Premiership. He had his part to play, and that was the role in which he had been cast. Grounded in resentment against his obscure birth and childhood poverty, nurtured in the Fabian Society, the ILP and other offshoots of the late Victorian urge to improve the conditions of the poor without seriously incommoding the rich, brought to fruition in four and a half years of bloody warfare followed by a fraudulent peace and hysterical reaction against the strain and agony of war, his moment surely came.9

  It was easy for Malcolm Muggeridge, whose father was a Labour MP, and who himself moved from a position of communism to disillusionment, to mock James Ramsay MacDonald, just as it was for him to mock the Labour Party as ‘Marxists and nonconformist clergymen and pacifists and check-weighmen and Clydeside demagogues’. What these ‘mugwumps’ had in common, however, was the rather simple desire of wanting Britain to be a slightly more decent place, or in the case of some of the loftier radicals, such as Colonel Wedgwood, the desire to bring out England’s inherent decency. ‘Those who believe in human nature must above all seek to put an end to the present hideous exploitation of the working classes,’ wrote this ki
ndly factory-owner and pottery-manufacturer from North Staffordshire.

  The choice before us is obvious. There are just two roads. Those who will not believe that you can do away with exploitation – that is, those who do not want to do away with it – all those ‘in the interests of Society’ will regulate, inspect and convert the working man into a machine that shall like its servitude. And there are those who know that exploitation can be stopped, and that man can yet be free; they will take liberty and justice as their guides, and pin their faith to the perfectibility of human nature. Is our guide to be – Police or Freedom?10

  Neither the Conservative Party nor Lords Beaverbrook or Rothermere much wanted to be around when this alarming alternative was seen as a realistic choice. Much to their relief, Ramsay MacDonald’s government did not last out the year 1924. It attempted to do something to provide poor people with decent housing. The short life and career of Basil Jellicoe (1899–1935), nephew of the admiral who commanded the fleet at the battle of Jutland, demonstrated the desperate need for housing. He served briefly in the navy at the end of the war, and, as an Oxford undergraduate, he almost immediately went to work among the desperate slums in Somers Town, just north of Euston Station in London. Twenty-two thousand people lived in the parish of Somers Town, all sharing rooms, in damp, unhygienic houses with no adequate washing or lavatory facilities. He was ordained a priest in the Church of England, and with a capital of £250 founded the St Pancras Housing Improvement Society.

  The squalid conditions in the district just north of Euston Station were noticed by Jellicoe, but he could have been speaking of Birmingham, Bristol, Bradford, Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow or any of the slums in the big Victorian cities, when he said that Somers Town houses were:

  the Devil’s holiday, a kind of perpetual festival of All Sinners. It has been produced by selfishness, stupidity and sin, and only Love Incarnate can put it right. The slums produce something much more terrible than mere discomfort and discontent. They produce a kind of horrible excommunication; a fiendish plan on the part of the Powers of Evil to keep people from the happiness for which God made them, and from seeing the beauties of His world …11

  In 1924 Basil Jellicoe, Percy Maryon-Wilson, Edith Neville and Miss I. N. Hill of the Charity Organization Society got together round Jellicoe’s dining-table resolved to do something. It was not until a year later, July 1925, that the St Pancras Housing Improvement Society was inaugurated. They bought eight slum houses with money raised by subscription and began work reconditioning them. The next year, quite by surprise, sixty-nine houses and an open space of 16,000 square feet became available. They needed a substantial sum for the deposit and £25,000 for the remainder to be paid in five months. Maryon-Wilson managed, by engineering the public support of the Minister of Health, Neville Chamberlain, and such figures as John Galsworthy and Lord Cecil, to raise the money. The old houses in Sidney Street were finally dynamited in 1930, and two months later Admiral Jellicoe laid the first brick of the new blocks of flats.

  Twenty-first-century aesthetes might flinch to read of these eighteenth-century houses being blown up and replaced with the tenement buildings which, seventy-five years later, wear a joyless air. Such purists would miss the heady atmosphere in which Jellicoe and his friends said farewell to the verminous Victorian legacy of urban poverty. They had a Solemn Burning in Sidney Street. ‘We had previously built a large bonfire, ten feet high and on the top of this pyre had placed large models of a bug, a flea, a rat and a louse, all stuffed with fireworks, and these were solemnly burnt.’

  People still remember Basil Jellicoe in North London. He was recently the subject of a spirited musical by Rob Inglis enacted at the Shaw Theatre, in his old parochial stamping-ground. His name survives in grateful families. A teacher I know in her thirties, of Irish Catholic stock, remembers her grandmother’s fond memories of Father Jellicoe as the man who stood up for the poor. This woman’s grandmother was struck in those intolerant days by how freely the Church of England parson Jellicoe gave himself for the Irish Catholics as well as for the Church of England people. The huge family of over a dozen children into which she had been born was rescued by Jellicoe from the foulest of slums and given a place to live which it was possible to clean, and where children could lead a healthy life.

  Inspired partly by the example of Jellicoe, other areas of the country followed. In Leeds it was another Anglican priest, Charles Jenkinson, who led the campaign for better housing – though a very different sort of Anglican from Jellicoe’s Anglo-Catholicism. Jenkinson was a member of the Modern Churchman’s Union.12

  Jellicoe died aged thirty-six. Archbishop Temple said: ‘There are some with whom it seems to be a necessary quality that they should die young – Mozart among musicians; Keats and Shelley among poets; and among the saints, with many another, Basil Jellicoe.’13

  Beyond its own modest housing schemes, the first Labour government made no attempt to make Britain socialist. It was hounded out of office by a press scare, designed to make everyone fear that Ramsay MacDonald was the mustachioed Caledonian mask of Leninism.

  During the summer, Arthur Ponsonby, son of the royal courtier Fritz Ponsonby, and a Labour MP, was the chief negotiator on behalf of the British government with the Soviet Union, when it was proposed that Britain would give diplomatic recognition of the USSR and offer loans. Russia was in a bad way, in the aftermath of a civil war, with its agricultural system in chaos. From a humanitarian point of view, there was obviously a case for British loans. MacDonald and his party had welcomed the Kerensky government in March 1917 but had never given succour or encouragement to Bolshevism, nor indeed to any political acts of violence. But the two treaties drawn up, one for the settlement of diplomatic differences between Britain and the Soviet Union, and the other for loans, excited fierce opposition. ‘No Money for Murderers’ was the slogan behind which Lloyd George, the Conservatives and the press united to attack the Labour administration.

  Then the Foreign Office got hold of a letter, dated 15 September, purporting to have been sent by one G. Zinoviev, president of the Communist International in Moscow, to the British Communist party, urging British Communists to do all they could to ratify the treaties. The letter reached Conservative Central Office, and the Daily Mail, which published it. MacDonald himself did not see a copy of the letter until 16 October, but by then the damage was done.14 The public had been fed the idea that the Labour party was the deceptively benign face of International Communism. There was yet another election, and this time it was a triumph for the Conservatives. Stoked up by Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail and by Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative Party, the electorate sent 419 Conservative members to Westminster, out of 615. Labour had 151 seats. The Liberals were reduced to 40 seats, and huddled behind Lloyd George’s leadership. It was a mere eighteen years since their landslide victory, and only two years since Lloyd George, the Man Who Won The War, had been leading what looked like the natural party of government.

  The fear of communism, rather than the charm of the Conservative party, was what lay behind the election result. Benign Colonel Wedgwood’s rhetorical question backfired. ‘Those who will not believe that you can do away with exploitation – that is, those who do not want to do away with it – all those “in the interests of Society” will regulate, inspect and convert the working man into a machine that shall like its servitude.’ That, precisely, is what the early years of Baldwin’s Second Government showed that the Conservative party wanted.

  The word ‘unemployment’ had come into being during Gladstone’s last government15 to describe the mass effects of depression in capitalism. Since the 1880s at least, the capitalist world had suffered from cycles of unemployment, but in the post-world war era, it became much more acute. In 1921 there were 2 million British workers unemployed, the worst depression since the Industrial Revolution began. Then things picked up a little, but, in spite of an increase in the numbers in work, there were still 1 million unemployed. The expor
t trades were continuing to produce goods for which there was no world market.16

  It was at this stage of things that Baldwin returned for his second term in office and appointed as his Chancellor of the Exchequer a man who, for all his sterling qualities, was not noted for his skills as an economist: Winston Churchill.

  The very last thing which should have happened at this stage of the economic cycle was for the British to so fix their currency that it became even more expensive for foreigners to buy British goods. John Maynard Keynes argued in a series of articles in the Nation that laissez-faire economics could not solve the unemployment crisis, and he also argued passionately for keeping Britain off the gold standard until the pound had found its level in the international currency markets.17 Yet the new Conservative Chancellor – new in the sense of being new to the job, and new as a Conservative, having crossed over from the Liberal benches – was determined to fix the pound at its old prewar parity with the dollar: £1 = $4.86. Following the Conservative election victory, the pound rose against the dollar, reaching $4.80 in early 1925. Montagu Norman, the governor of the Bank of England, favoured Britain returning to the gold standard. Churchill was persuaded by the Treasury and by the Bank that it was worth while for Britain to go on to the gold standard at this rate, even if the short-term effects on the workforce were harsh. It was a ‘sacrifice’ worth making. Churchill was persuaded against his better judgement: he was half-persuaded by one of Keynes’s articles: ‘I would rather see Finance less proud and Industry more content,’ he wrote in a memo to the Treasury.18 But this mood did not last long.

  With the inevitable dip in exports, Baldwin said in July 1925: ‘All the workers of this country have got to take reductions in wages to help put industry on its feet.’19

  As in 1848, when the government took very great precautions to prepare against a Chartist Revolution, so in 1926 Baldwin’s Conservatives took highly effective steps to cripple the political power of the working class. The diplomatic settlement of the Ruhr occupation meant that there was now plentiful cheap coal available to be imported from Germany and Poland. It led to a reduction in the coal price, and the inevitable demand by mine-owners that the British coal miners should accept a cut in wages.